[kristjansson]

Of course Tufte's body of work a whole, and VDQI in particular address those issues, but chartjunk is, in my reading, a specific and limited complaint. His leading two examples are unintended moiré effect in cross hatching unnecessary grid lines. His third (the duck) is a bit more nebulous, but I read it as any sort of overly cute “we can so we did” effect on a visualization.

The mortal sins of data visualization misrepresent the data; the venal sin of chartjunk distracts from the data.